Another look back:
Oregon boys encounter the Jim Crow South
A hundred years later the exclusionary laws were gone, but the reality on the ground was a state with few Black residents, even in the Portland area. Tam Moore and Larry Slessler are members of the Silent Generation, boys who grew up and went to school in the small cities of Medford and Corvallis, each of which then had about 18,000 people. Moore remembers one Black girl in junior high school, who moved away before high school. Larry Slessler remembers no Blacks at Medford High School in the 1950s.
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| 1957 Ford Thunderbird |
My fellow Baby Boomers came of age as the Civil Rights era was underway. Our vivid early memories were of demonstrations, police dogs, fire hoses, and Martin Luther King. It was a period of change. Moore and Slessler were outsiders, witnessing with fresh eyes what came before the change.
Tam Moore:
My own life in the South during military times reflected similar distain for the Jim Crow culture.I sold my car in early 1957 before my Corvallis High buddy Jack Young and I drove east to Columbus, GA for second lieutenant school at Fort Benning. It was a red Olds 88, a great car. And sure enough in late spring I found a used Ford Thunderbird for sale at a Fort Lauderdale service station. Of course I bought it.
Lt. Moore, in Vietnam
The tires were worn, the only thing wrong. So on a day off from the Infantry School, I drove the T-Bird into a Columbus, Georgia tire shop for a new set of really-good tires. A White guy who literally had a red neck took my order for what was probably the shop's biggest single order of the day -- five new tires. What I watched, while those tires went on, was the "redneck" verbally abusing the sweating Black men who did all of the work in the bays. The boss man never put a hand on a tire, just talked, sometimes condescendingly. It left a lasting impression.That memory lingered again, and I shared it with Medford lawyer Tom Parks, a former Peace Corps volunteer, who sadly just died this month. I shared it after he told me the story of two White college kids (he was one of them) riding bicycles across the South to join the 1963 Freedom March. He told me they experienced culture shock. Repeatedly.
Larry Slessler:
Slessler, 1961
In 1962, I was a young Lt. stationed in South Carolina. In late September 1962; my wife Kathie, 5 month old daughter Jennifer and I moved to a different rental. Our landlord and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. “P” were a middle aged couple living next door. They could not have been kinder to us.
Both Mr. and Mrs. P treated Kathie and me like a son and daughter and Jennifer like a granddaughter. Mr. P took me fishing and taught me the fine art of southern lake fishing. Spending time with him was a pleasure.
Things went a bit “South” for us after a few months into 1963. I had made friends with a fellow Lt and Kathie liked his wife. We invited them over for dinner and social time. Quintin and Edna were a well-educated black couple from the northeast. We four had a grand evening and I looked forward to seeing Quinten at work. We both were huge sports fans and had a lot in common.
The next evening Mr. P called on me. He said; “I told the boys you are just a dumb northerner and don’t know any better. If you ever repeat last night I can’t keep them off you.” That threat was delivered with a real edge that left no doubt about what would happen. From that moment on Quinton and our wives could socialize only on a military installation. Jim Crow and the KKK were alive and well in 1963 South Carolina.
Later that year Mr. and Mrs. P came to us for a favor. Mrs. P had been diagnosed with cancer. The nearest place for the treatment she required was at Duke Hospital in North Carolina. Mr. P ask us to take care of their place as they would be gone for at least 10 days-two weeks. We agreed to care take.
To my surprise, Mr. and Mrs. P were back in two or three days. I asked them why they were back so soon. I was hoping for good news like a false diagnoses. Mrs. P looked me in the eye and said; “There were “N’s” in the hospital and she would die first before she would be in a hospital with “N’s.” And she did--die of cancer.
To this day I cannot grasp the kind of inner racial hatred that consumed Mrs. P. She was so kind and loving on one hand and so full of venomous hate on the other based solely on skin color. I didn’t understand in 1963 and I still don’t in 2022.
6 comments:
This morning the SCOTUS announced they would be reviewing affirmative action. The only reason they would do so would be to strike it down. However, my guess they won't abolish it completely, just make it more restricted.
One way to look at racism is through the lens of class. Inherent in this is the idea that the privileges of one class cannot be enjoyed by the class beneath them. This disrupts the system, for both the class under assault and the ones above it, because when people agitate for social justice it tends to ripple through the entire society.
The bigoted South depends on a strict class system, derived from slavery. The white middle class is actually more economically oppressed relative to the poor and have more in common with them but generations of bigotry have preserved the social order.
Oregon's lack of diversity is concerning, and to me reflects a similar situation, maybe even worse, as evidenced by the growing white nationalism in rural counties.
The racism Mr. Slessler encountered in 1963 was present at our nation’s founding and remains with us today, although now it’s less blatant. Nor was it limited to the South.
It brings to mind the recent passing of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the champions of justice and human rights during South Africa’s long struggle against apartheid. As President Cyril Ramaphosa described him: “He knew in his soul that good would triumph over evil, that justice would prevail over inequity, and that reconciliation would prevail over revenge and recrimination. He knew that apartheid would end and democracy would come. He was convinced, even to the end of his life, that poverty, hunger and misery can be defeated – that all people can live together in peace, security and comfort.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
My first taste of southern racism was also in the military service. When I landed in Pensacola, Florida in 1967 as a newly minted Navy ensign, I took a cab from the airport to the naval air station. Driving through a very squalid black neighborhood, the white cab driver seemed to take great joy in explaining to me why the boxy narrow houses on each lot were called “shotgun houses”. He described how a single blast of a shotgun through the front door could do great harm to all the occupants.
Growing up in Medford provided only a veiled view of racism. It was there but it was not overt and accepted like southern racism. “The 1619 Project” is much maligned by opponents of studying the less than glorious parts of our history but I highly recommend it to those like me who cannot comprehend how members of one race can consider those of another less than human.
Mr. Snider--
I believe you have mischaracterized the bases upon which the 1619 Project is maligned, at least by its educated critics from either side of the political aisle. Start for instance with the dean of American history scholarship--and staunch leftist--Gordon S. Wood, who wrote the NYT along with several other academics, black and white, concerning the Project's grievous shortcomings.
The strawmen of MSNBC and CNN leftists notwithstanding, there really is little meaningful opposition to "studying the less than glamorous parts of our history". There IS opposition, however, to modish advocacy journalists with scanty academic credentials positing patent idiocies, especially to impressionable K-12 students, such as slavery being the primary cause of the Revolutionary War.
There certainly was a period, today amply corrected in public school history curricula, during which American history instruction was sanitized and whitewashed. That course correction, pun stumbled upon, should not indulge the ahistorical leftist conceit that America vis a vis slavery or otherwise is somehow worse in kind than any other happenstance topdog across globe and time.
European slavers rarely had to venture inland because West African slavers, unlike the Europeans already well-practised for centuries in the trade, brought their own brothers and sisters shipside for ready sale. A much greater number overall than went to the Americas went north and east especially to Muslim purchasers. Africa remains the only continent with a flourishing slave trade.
As I see it, historical moralizing should be balanced and applied without connection to contemporaneous political priorities, whether it's tear-soaked, overwrought paeans to flag and country for 1950s American Legion patriotic essay contests, or the breast-beating testimonials about thankfully long-moribund race oppression so valued by today's progressive consciousness-raisers.
Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project openly states that her work is a case for wholesale reparations. Do the progressives here on the Sage blog really support that?
There's an excellent article in The Atlantic that shows Mr. Dungeon's understanding of the 1619 Project to be disingenuous at best.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/
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